The blue shape is a Reuleaux triangle, and it has a lot of interesting mathematical properties. You might recognize it from drill bits, guitar picks and tamper-proof nuts in fire hydrants. www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicia...

The extreme variance of Earth’s everyday atmosphere comes from air molecules pushed across the planet by the energy of the sun. This chaos does not mean we don’t know what will happen as the atmosphere absorbs more energy. www.quantamagazine.org/the-climate-...

For nearly a century, mathematicians wondered whether a conjecture about knots was true. In a paper posted in June, researchers found infinitely many counterexamples, revealing a new layer of complexity in this area of math. Leila Sloman reports: www.quantamagazine.org/a-simple-way...

Our best descriptions of nature, quantum mechanics and general relativity, are failing us. To dig into the deepest levels of reality, we’re going to need new physics.

In the 1960s and 70s, Syukuro Manabe pioneered ways to model Earth’s atmosphere. In 2021, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, which is often cited as foundational to modern climate science.

Public key cryptography makes digital signatures possible: They create mathematical proof that a message was generated by the holder of a private key. www.quantamagazine.org/how-public-k...

Every molecule of carbon dioxide that we add to Earth’s atmosphere adds to a churn of compounding chaos — but we know where it is headed.

Beginning in the 1970s, sleep psychologist Irene Tobler set out behavioral criteria to show that sleep is not unique to higher-order mammals — even cockroaches sleep. (From the archive) www.quantamagazine.org/sleep-evolve...

In 1988, a heat wave in the US killed thousands and caused $80B in damage. Congress turned to scientists for answers. James Hansen, then a director at NASA, testified that “the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

What happens when you get to the end of things? Physicist John Wheeler devoted his life to this question, in the end leaving behind not an answer, but an idea more profound than the thought that sparked it. www.quantamagazine.org/john-wheeler...

All known life makes up Earth's biosphere. Humans are its first and only emergent species to deliberately have a planetary impact. @wanderinggaia.bsky.social surveys this critical moment in our evolutionary history:

Climate models are built by dividing Earth’s atmosphere into boxes, estimating the conditions within each box, then using fluid equations to calculate how fluids and energy migrate between boxes. The models capture global dynamics remarkably well.

A black hole unlike any seen before has been spotted in the early universe. The discovery by the James Webb Space Telescope upends the textbook understanding of the cosmos's evolution. www.quantamagazine.org/a-single-nak...

🔮 If you peered into a crystal ball and glimpsed Earth's future, you might see a planet that looks a lot like our fiery, hospitable neighbor, Venus.

The ice-loving alga Chlamydomonas nivalis has a red carotenoid pigment that stains snow pink or red — a phenomenon known as “watermelon snow” or “blood snow.”

Alexander Mordvintsev, a research scientist at Google, has created complex cell-based digital systems that use only neighbor-to-neighbor communication. These “neural cellular automata” could have promising applications in biology, computing and robotics. www.quantamagazine.org/self-assembl...

It is an incontrovertible fact that we are changing the Earth’s temperature by adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The full impact of this simple fact is chaotic and nuanced.

From methane-eaters to rain-makers, the microbial powers of the Earth’s smallest organisms read like something out of a fantasy novel.

Animals, fire, water and wood helped humans harvest energy in new ways. These innovations shaped our bodies, cultures, and local environments. With fossil fuels, the impacts became planetary. This “extended biosphere” is an extension of our species.

The state of oceans and ice sheets — and, in turn, the climate — in 2100 will depend heavily on where they are right now.

Geologists and data scientists are building system models of Earth’s ancient past like we’ve never seen before. www.quantamagazine.org/climate-extr...

Only half of nitrogen applied as fertilizer is taken up by crops. The rest runs off into waterways as nitrate pollution or is eaten by microbes, some of which turn it into nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.

In some molecules, electrons are imbalanced. When radiation hits these imbalanced molecules, they vibrate or spin. This motion redirects the radiation in a random direction. We call this quantum phenomenon the greenhouse effect. www.quantamagazine.org/the-quantum-...

Time wears on us all; Venus was also a lot cooler when it was younger. www.quantamagazine.org/why-is-venus...

Each year, enough dust to build 1,000 copies of the Great Pyramid of Giza is lofted into the atmosphere. These grains of sand seed cloud formation, fertilize the seafloor, and impact heat retention. Mere specks of dust influence the nature of the entire planet. www.quantamagazine.org/how-climate-...

The effort to build climate science spans scientific disciplines and national borders. It must surely be the most significant scientific collaboration in human history.

Hi! Today @quantamagazine.bsky.social published a special issue on climate science, featuring stories about how Earth's climate fundamentally works that I needed to read after covering climate impacts for so many years. I hope you'll check it out! <3 www.quantamagazine.org/how-we-came-...

Climate science is the most significant scientific collaboration in history, and its lessons are a massive human achievement. “How We Came To Know Earth,” our new series, is a guide to the modern understanding of fundamental climate science. www.quantamagazine.org/series/clima...

Even if disturbed, the textures made by building blocks called neural cellular automata have the ability to heal themselves. By understanding how simple components form complex systems, scientists could theoretically coax bodies to regenerate missing limbs. www.quantamagazine.org/self-assembl...

The ability to simulate 3D quantum fields would present physicists with the tools to probe complex processes that are beyond the reach of even the most powerful supercomputers. Physicists are racing to get there first. www.quantamagazine.org/analog-vs-di...

Happy 100th birthday, quantum mechanics!

You can try it for yourself here: distill.pub/2020/growing... Read more about neural cellular automata: www.quantamagazine.org/self-assembl...

New research shows that the cytoskeleton of human cells have a lot more in common with our ancient ancestors than we might think.

A black hole unlike any seen before has been spotted in the early universe. The discovery by the James Webb Space Telescope upends the textbook understanding of the cosmos's evolution. @walkingthedot.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/a-single-nak...

Biology is full of small components (a cell, an ant, a bird) that, given simple rules, form complex systems (an organism, a colony, a flock). Inspired by nature, “complexity engineering” seeks to design building blocks that can self-assemble into any form.

Ancient cells called Asgard archaea were first discovered at the hydrothermal vent site called Loki's Castle in 2010. Their discovery has shaken up our view of the Tree of Life. www.quantamagazine.org/tiny-tubes-r...

After more than a decade of working together, the physicists Christine Muschik and Martin Ringbauer recently co-led the first quantum simulation of a two-dimensional quantum force field. www.quantamagazine.org/analog-vs-di...

Lokiarchaea are tricky to work with in the lab: they grow very slowly, exclusively in an oxygen free environment with the presence of symbiotic bacteria. But with careful nurturing, scientists hope to witness their cell division at work.

The cells of your body follow simple rules and play off one another to form a complete organism. The researcher Alexander Mordvintsev has developed “neural cellular automata,” building blocks that can self-assemble into any form. @georgemusser.com reports: www.quantamagazine.org/self-assembl...

As a child, Hannah Cairo learned math by taking online lessons from Khan Academy. By the time she was 14, she had taught herself the equivalent of an advanced undergraduate math degree. Tune in to The Quanta Podcast: Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/7b17... Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h...

Asgard archaea were first found in mud at the bottom of the North Sea. Today, cellular biologists Martin Pilhofer and Christa Schleper are exploring one of their more elusive structural elements: a totally tubular system that looks a lot like our own. www.quantamagazine.org/tiny-tubes-r...

According to quantum field theory, forces like electromagnetism and the strong force emerge from quantum fields, fluidlike entities that fill the universe. Recently, physicists used this Google quantum processor to simulate dynamics of a quantum force field. www.quantamagazine.org/analog-vs-di...

One of our most primitive ancestors possesses the same tube-like building blocks that make complex life possible. www.quantamagazine.org/tiny-tubes-r...

You likely have a world model running inside your skull right now — it’s how you know not to step in front of a moving train without needing to run the experiment first. So far, AI lacks such a scaled-down representation of the environment.

Deep learning luminaries including Yann LeCun, Demis Hassabis and Yoshua Bengio all believe that a snow globe–like model of our world is essential for building AI systems that are truly smart, scientific and safe.

The Fourier transform is everywhere you look. It has helped scientists to study tides, detect gravitational waves, and develop radar and MRI technology. Here’s how it works.

New math shows that when one species splits from another on the evolutionary tree, it hits the gas.

In 1981, Richard Feynman famously quipped that “if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical.” Only quantum computers can faithfully model the world in its true nature. @shalmawegs.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/analog-vs-di...

“It’s hard to overestimate the influence of Fourier analysis in math,” said mathematician Leslie Greengard. “It touches almost every field of math and physics and chemistry and everything else.”

How can an AI system model the whole world?